Dimensions of Social Identity in Northern Ireland

Academic and official commentaries generally use the terms “Protestants” and “Catholics” to refer to the two communities in Northern Ireland. However, Whyte (1990) noted that the practice of using religious labels for these communities is quite recent and twenty years ago it was not unusual to describe the dichotomy in terms of unionist and nationalist or the Ulster British and the Ulster Irish. Whyte argued that the main advantage for researchers of using the Protestant/Catholic labels is that they seem to correspond to the fundamental reference groups for people living in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, it is usually assumed that although these labels are denominational they also reflect contrasting national identities and political allegiances as the division between Catholics and Protestants is not tempered by an overarching shared national identity or competing sources of group identification (Horowitz, 1990; Moxon-Browne, 1991).